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HP To Acquire 3com For $2.7 Billion
An anonymous reader writes "HP and 3Com Corporation today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase 3Com, a leading provider of networking switching, routing and security solutions, at a price of $7.90 per share in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors."
... what happened to 3com. Some of us remember "back in the day" when 3com was one of the top brands for network cards (3c503 or 3c509 anyone?). Then their cards disappeared from the market some years ago, apparently they decided to focus on other areas. I guess it isn't a huge surprise that they would become a target for acquisition.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a current HP bastard (who didn't post this, BTW), this pissed me off. We've endured pay cuts, benefit cuts, no raises, mass firings, hell, my local office can't even purchase paper plates & disposable spoons, and somehow there's enough money to purchase another company.
I can't wait for 500MB driver packages, 234454 running background processes and 7 tray icons required to configure the hardware.
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Started with them in Massachusetts in '93. They had some of the worst and most disorganized upper management ever. The guys doing corporate strategy must have been ADHD. They would buy a new (usually startup) company every year...some good, some bad. Kept the original management for a year, then, after all the developers and original management had gotten PO'd and left, bought another company and did the same thing. Year after year. I'm not sure what they got out of it.
I was laid off after they'd spent several years developing a gigabit enterprise switch, sold the first few, then made s surprise announcement that they were leaving the enterprise business. You can imagine how their major customers, who'd started to build new infrastructure using these switches, took that news.
They did give out great clothing, though. Still have a collection. Great co-workers, good projects, extremely poor corporate management.
Why is anybody surprised by this? Cisco announces a server product with very strong networking abilities. This is pretty much one of the few large areas of the datacenter (hardware wise) that Cisco hasn't moved into (besides disk arrays). HP sees this as a huge threat to them (bigger than IBM, who makes most revenue from services including running datacenters comprised of non-IBM equipment).
HP now realizing that they don't have the networking expertise to go after cisco directly in the networking space (one area they need to expand into to gain marketshare in the datacenter beyond servers and HDS rebranded storage, or that midrange Compaq based arrays). Well, they could go after the #2 enterprise networking company (Juniper, but they have a market cap of ~$13B), so they pick up 3com and whatever is left of it (remember they used to be partnered a while ago with Huauei, that partnership is gone tho), so they can better fight against Cisco for networking.
For these big companies it's all about expanding your presence and finding new revenue streams. Cisco can't seriously increase it's core routing/switching marketshare very easily any more than HP can increase its server marketshare.
It's not always easy to grow your company organically (from within). Look at cisco, they buy security companies, storage switching companies, WebEx. Hell, when they were a router only company, they bought an ethernet switching company (Crescendo) which later became the bread and butter business for them.